Join NEOUPA at the Cleveland Clinic downtown for a presentation and tour. Kaitlan Chu will be sharing her experiences of conducting the Clinic's first-even UX study, which included a large open card sort. Kaitlan will discuss the study itself, as well as how she initiated the first in-house usability study; challenges faced and lessons learned throughout the process; the implication of this study and its impact on the UX efforts in the organization.

Before the presentation, you’ll have the opportunity to see some of Cleveland Clinic’s high-tech patient care facilities, visit the rooftop terrace, and see the remarkable underground robotic supply transport system.

About the speaker:

Kaitlan Chu is the sole IA for Cleveland Clinic's enterprise website whose 13,000 pages receive 120,000+ visits daily. She provides thought leadership on usability on the Clinic's web and mobile platforms. Kaitlan believes in letting data settle design debates from her 9 years of experience in information architecture, interaction design, and usability research in the health care, consulting management, academic and non-profit segments. She conducts usability studies and evangelizes the research findings throughout the organization, one of the top 4 hospitals in the United States.

Thanks to NEOUPA president Cathleen Zapata (@catzap) from Metrics Marketing Group (www.MetricsMarketing.com - @MetricsMrktg) for suggesting and arranging the tour. The tour was a great start – it really set the mood to learn a little of the history and philosophy of the Cleveland Clinic before looking at the hospital's website user experience (UX) plan.

Kaitlan Chu started her presentation with the background from which the study was developed. It is very important to understand the organizational culture and history before starting a usability study of this type.

Historically, each department head would establish the structure their individual sections of the website. This did have an advantage in that the doctors who headed these departments knew the needs of their patients and insured that the website addressed those needs. However, this decentralized the management of the website, which led to difficulties for users in navigating between department areas. The website development team needed to develop a quantitative method to document the visitor's (normally patients and their family members) needs and then develop a hospital-wide navigation structure.

From my notes - Planning the study:

Quantitative

Open card sort

Online, remote study

Put together a team

Budget of $300

Had 200 people in study.

Analysis guidelines

Was hard to find guidelines

Since this was the Clinic's first-ever usability study, it was important to use methods that would be accepted by the key decision makers. Thus, the research needed to be based on quantitative studies using authoritative sources to develop a hospital-wide website site map. The Cleveland Clinic website team decided to use an open card sort, since it offered the flexibility they desired to accommodate more study participants' input.

Open card sort - In an open card sort, participants create their own names for the categories. This helps reveal not only how they mentally classify the cards, but also what terms they use for the categories. Open sorting is generative; it is typically used to discover patterns in how participants classify, which in turn helps generate ideas for organizing information.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sorting#Open_card_sorting

Closed card sort - In a closed card sort, participants are provided with a predetermined set of category names. They then assign the index cards to these fixed categories. This helps reveal the degree to which the participants agree on which cards belong under each category. Closed sorting is evaluative; it is typically used to judge whether a given set of category names provides an effective way to organize a given collection of content.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sorting#Closed_card_sorting

Kaitlan went on to talk about the challenges of the project and how the team was developed. In addition to budget constraints, the website project team discovered that while the pilot test using internal staff went quickly (approximately 20 minutes), testing with people that better represented visitors to the hospital took much longer (approximately 45 minutes). Kaitlan also reported that there were no guidelines on how to do this type of testing in a setting like the Cleveland Clinic, so she used usability books as a starting point to develop standards appropriate for the Clinic. (I highly recommend meeting with Katilan to learn about this.)

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